essays or at lease two novelists do not do so within their novels. that is to say, the essay is firmly and unashamedly in the revealed sensibility of the author and any novel that any of you feel that she had a shakespeare like interaction of the characters. so that we can have dialogue but not little lectures pasted in as it were. tolstoy would be a huge case in point. of course, he had the good, artistic grace and sense to wait until the end of one piece before of these before explicitly setting up a theory of history, which had been

tacitly and subtly demonstrated by the preceding thousand pages of fiction. it requires very little thought to come up with examples of novelists using a character to give a straightforward lecture or in the case of a lecture on the painting of the dead christ. i think you have a copy of that incredible picture. it was in 1867 that the painting was first seen. his wife recalls how he stood for 20 minutes before the picture without moving.

i often notice during the first moments of his epileptic fit. he could never forget and station that he had experienced in the museum in 1857. the figure of christ taken from the cross whose body party showed signs of decomposition haunted him like a horrible nightmare. and he comes back as painting and the idiot. he explains why some people may lose their faith by looking at that picture. later in the book he includes a whole lecture on the painting by a minor character. and i'll just read you a couple little bits from that lecture.

the picture depicted christ who has just been taken from the cross. in the picture, the face is terribly smashed blows and covered with terrible swollen and bloodstained bruisers. the eyes open and squinting. the large open once of the eyes have a sort of dead and glassy glimmer to them. strange to say as one looks at the dead body of his tortured man, one cannot help asking oneself the peculiar arrest in question. if such a corpse was seen by all the disciples, and how could they possibly have believed confronted with such a sight that the smarter would rise again. the people surrounding the dead man, must have been dismayed on

the evening which shattered all of their hopes and all of their beliefs in one fell blow. a state of the most dreadful terror, that each of them carried away with them a mighty thought which would never be wrestled from them. on the eve of the crucifixion, if the master could have seen what he would look like when taken from the cross, would he have gone to the cross and died as he did? this question as well. you can help but ask yourself if you look at the picture. i guess you could argue that passage is a good instance of the kind of thing that has led some people to claim that he is a rather clumsy novelists, albeit a profound thinker. but it doesn't require much thought at all to come up with some of the lectures are essays

in other books. there is the famous essay on the disintegration of values in the book the sleepwalkers. not in novels are often tacit or written in response to ones that have gone before. in other words, they are traumatized and saves about these earlier novels. he points out the tradition of what china calls a syllabus of inactive criticism. it is, among other things, a

critique. it is to another novel, anna karenina for interpretation. in both cases, james and tolstoy make good of the that was there in the earlier books. in the case of "the sleepwalkers", the most important for us is the new art of the specifically novelistic essay, which does not claim to bear in apodictic message, but remains hypothetical war ironic. if anyone doesn't know what it means, raise your hand and we

will have security escort you from the building. to be honest, i don't know what it means either, but i thought it would sound clever by quoting the passage. the reason this was on achieved is that he feels the essay written allegedly by one of the characters do so much like the author's presentation of the kind of ideological key to the larger work of which it is a part. in an interview, he is asked to elaborate. the essay automatically enters the realm of play and properties. reflection is essentially inquiring.

there is an obvious contradiction here. the essay on the disintegration of values is not being adequately assimilated by the novels almost all chemical special processing. it becomes hypothetical. i think it doesn't mean that you have to put your essays into the mouths of characters, of course their art memorable bits where views are obviously his. the crucial thing is tone.

all of that meditation on kitsch is vitally important. there is a great deal of reflection experienced and study, that the tone is never serious, it is provocative. says kundera. it is what i mean is that we buy the novelistic essay. i think in keeping with that, the novels are full of these reading and math little essays on anything and everything. all the more hilarious for being so furiously and insanely serious. he is writing about exaggeration from his last great novel.

how great of a novel to be called extinction. i will just read a little passage to you. this is where they are kind of droning on. i cultivated the art of exaggeration to such a pitch that i can call myself the greatest exponent that i know of. no one has carried the art of exaggeration to such extremes, and if i were suddenly asked to say what i really was secretly, i would have to say that is the greatest artist that i knew in the field of exaggeration. the art of exaggeration is the art of making one's existence and durable. they have always been the great exaggerator's. whatever they were, whatever they achieved, they owed solely to the art of exaggeration.

the painter that doesn't exaggerate is a poor painter. the musician that doesn't exaggerate is a poor musician. and the writer doesn't exaggerate is a poor writer. the art of exaggeration consists in understanding everything, in which case we have to say that they exaggerated understatement. it is there a particular version of the art of exaggeration. there's a nice little critique on the state of exaggeration. one has to actually disagree. they have to disagree with kundera. it seems to be an ironic and playful essay into a novel, as long as it is consistent with the rest of the book. thomas mahon, i guess, with a long disquisitions about time

and that cosmically boring masterpiece. or the lecture in beethoven's last piano piece. or if you look at that handout, which has this page from the 1972 prize-winning novel, just to give you a bit of context. this is from the middle of a sex scene where burger writes off to discuss the impossibility of writing a sex scene. he also displays his great gift of being a visual artist as well. [laughter] to stress the kind of novel writing for him, he has a

passage that appears as an essay in his own writing. before it was pasted in. before the days of computers. burger and susan sontag described themselves as storytellers. but i think their natural tendencies was towards the analytical. at different points they had defined forms of fiction that harnessed and made a virtue of this inclination of the dispersive. i think it went from intellectual to storyteller. the first volume of his trilogy

about peasant life in the french alps. the fiction there is bracketed by what burger calls an explanation and a historical afterword. and sometimes case, as is i have crudely joked in an essay, it seems to me that she is a great critic, but she couldn't tell a story to save her life. the idea of this physical novelistic essay makes one realize that shakespeare one has claylike essays. david shields points out in his manifesto about reality. and we will come back to that book shortly. he says that hamlet is a series of little essays.

this is not just me twisting shakespeare to suit my preferences. and the marginal comment on one of the solar please, it was written that this is forcibly shown the great montagne-ism of hamlet. herman melville conceded as well. the montagne-ism of kundera, i don't know about you, but i found that if i read it, while i still enjoy the essay part, i was becoming increasingly impatient with the novelistic part, which unfairly, i always remember as this of doctors

chasing after doctors. it is an essay in seven parts. it talks about all the stuff that i wanted from the essays about the kind of novelistic pitch. it is the book of laughter and forgetting. it was a novel in the form of variations. testaments betrayed was a series of variations in the form of the essay. the same is true of the later nonfiction book of his, the curtain, which ends with an extraordinary reflection. it is rather similar to the one advanced by steiner.

wonderful idea there. we have in both of these books, in other words is something that i have been increasingly fond of, that is to say that it is the novelistic essay minus the novel. and that, of course, is exactly what you get in this supremely great book. the idea of the essayist at essay, is what you get with the really great polish writers, yes, of course we value him for his reporting and the fact he witnessed all those revolutions and coups and in africa and

south america. but what makes him truly great, i think, are the digressions, the essays about anything and everything. he is a very interesting case. i know chris mentioned this morning the book about nigel. but it didn't make any difference to our appreciation of it because for so long we have either been indifferent or taken such pride in the fact that he was the hideous and monstrous human being. but he was somebody whose moral integrity was presented in the field so clearly in the work. when it emerged after his death that he was only able to roamed

the world of the dead, we don't want to get you back into that sort of conundrum that was so brilliantly described, but depending on your point of view, the work was severely compromised by that kind of revelation. there is also the vexed issue about whether he actually saw some of the events of which you provided such spellbinding eyewitness accounts. in a sense the allegations that he made that he wasn't at all reliable, that puts more emphasis on the wonderful essays that digressions were the shadow of the sun.

i think we have to mention rebecca west's book on yugoslavia and here she is in the 1930s. this is her in yugoslavia. a scene that seems so much like scenes from other authors. they moved rhythmically through the beams of white light. the billiard boards give out their sound of shock. there was the feeling of a shiftless it just doom. it seems possible that someone

might come and explain in terms just comfortable enough to make sure that it was not nonsensical. all the people at the tables must stay there until the two officers were playing billiards at that moment had played a million games. and that by the result, their eternal fates would be decided in this would be accepted in people with their client be waiting and reading the newspapers. in the epilogue to that book, this great book, 1200 pages of history of yugoslavia and i warmly recommend it. i really would. in the epilogue to that book, rebecca west comments that the

chief flaw was corrected in english literature, which is a failure to recognize the dynamism of ideas. i love this. with characteristic humans, rebecca west later decided that gibson cried out for ideas that he had not got any. [laughter] that yes, the dynamism of ideas. this is central to the appeal of the essay. rebecca said, you are absolutely right. ideas are essays what characters are to the novel. that's what we want of these

novel type essays. we get an abundance and has a lyrical and loving ebb and flow of ideas about space and time and place. he writes doom of the essay compared to the novel. doomed to authenticity to the conclusion of quotation marks. but it's more complicated than that, of course. because the book is prefaced by saying that it must all be imagined as those spoken by a character in a novel. in other words, the whole thing comes in quotation marks.

in this discussion of essays and fiction, of ideas and quotation marks, it seems to me that don demello came up with an entirely new version of the novelistic essay. especially in his book. we start off this morning with a discussion of essays. it is full of little lectures pasted them, like this one by one of the characters who was a film director. he says film is more than the 20th century art. it's the world seen from inside. we have come to a certain point in the history of film. the same can be found, film is implied in the thing itself. this is where we are.

the 20th century is on film. you have to ask yourself if there is anything more important than the fact that we are constantly on film, constantly watching. now, i think the reason that a passage like that doesn't feel pasted in the way that kundera objected to in the case of hermann broch, is because there are dozens of characters of all ages. men and women and kids. and they all sound exactly the same. i still don't know who's who. so what you get -- not the type of serious drawing room debates that you get. what you get are these amazing essays and dialogue about

everything and i will attempt to read a passage. i hope with this kind of setting you will be able to follow your way through it. 40 degrees celsius. 9 million people need at least 9 million people before you burn earn the right to call yourself a city. the sand is impressive. there's there is an old man with a broom sweeping sand off of one of the airport roads. i miss the sun. he was sweeping it back into the desert. a good man. i was only there a day. that's all it takes. great cities take a day and this is the test of a great city. the traffic and sewage and he and telephones.

get david to tell you about tehran, there is a city for you. then there are the great books by authors of greatness in others. these are extended, highly original essays. in the case of disabled and greece and india, these are not termed novels, but they are almost indistinguishable from the earlier models. they are almost essays that. perhaps his preference of mine

speaks to kind of impatience. an impatiens that you're probably showing come but don't worry, we're right on track. this tendency has been so well articulated i think by david shields in his book. he quotes borges. instead of reading or writing a 600 page novel, he preferred to write reviews of these books so they already existed. of course, it is absolutely impossible to say where the essays begin and fiction fans and vice versa. what you get in all the best essays are philosophical investigations. david shields is kind of unfairly seen as this anti-novel

jihadist. but increasingly the novel seems to offer entertainment, where what he wanted was a deep plumbing of consciousness. shields shows his impatience. his extreme inpatients that extends almost to the essay form itself. that book, it is a kind of collage or montage in which the people are not acknowledged or distinguished from his own beds. in this regard, i think shields was deeply influenced by david marks book called this is not a novel. it is a novel comprising unattributed quotations without any explanation or links and it

ends up being a highly sought after essay on the lifetime of reading. we are coming to the end. at this point, i would like and conservatively by pointing out something that you all know already. first, if it's of any quality, even the most straightforward, he crossed the road room and picked up a cuppa tea type of fiction. it is a certain type of quality of these type of essays. full of the kind of things we've always wanted from literature. observation so exact that emerges almost imperceptibly into you and your speculation. it is the kind of thing that i

can give you one example above. it is in one of the rabbit books. the rabbit is on a plane and he becomes suddenly conscious of the cold outside the plane. the cold you can scarcely believe is fair. but you sometimes actually feel it still packed in suitcases stored in the unpressurized also when you unpack your clothes. the dirty underwear and beach towels with the merciless chill of death from outer space still unknown. continuing with these downline fiction writers, i think the great attraction is things that have escaped our attention, partly because they are so

familiar. something that he actually draws our attention to when the protagonist reflects on the neighborhood of hammersmith and london where he lives, he describes it as just a block or two and half invisible. place in the oblivious city where my slogan gleamed and recovered. it seems to me that in the best writing in any form, we are all the time getting these imperceptible dress from description to reflection and the essays that. we are crossing back and forth all the time between the

metaphysical streets of the physical town. thank you, it is 12:05 p.m. exactly. you can have some lunch. [applause] >> the final panel from the key west literary seminar begins now. it features edmund white and those rows. this is about 40 minutes. >> good morning. or good afternoon. everything that geoff dyer said is true. you may not go to lunch.

[laughter] it is my privilege, these panelists, they are among my dearest and oldest friends. so the idea that we got to be flown to key west to sit up here and talk to each other about our greatest literary passion for free seems like a dream. today is going to be unlike some other episodes. it is serious business here and we have a lot to talk about.

.. half written and then ask you

what it is that drew you to these particular subjects. in each case it will be different, perhaps, but perhaps also the unity in theme will emerge. so then how want to describe all the books which are profoundly and impressively numerous, but despite purposes here, phyllis is the author of the book on virginia woolf, the biography of josephine baker and that a literary classic tale. edmund is the author among many other books and various forms, one vote -- wonderful novelist and essayist, beautifully compact biographies. brenda is the author of books on amelie dickenson, hawthorne,

gertrude on the austin. j., the triad of faulkner and steinbeck. that led to begin with phyllis who is next to me. what do you see as having draw new to these particular subjects? >> okay. i'd like to go back, if i may, little earlier considerably earlier to one i'm in grade school even to explain my rather simple notion about why the person writes a biography. when i was in grade school i think it must have been, i don't know, seventh or eighth grade. therefore i was not attend, i don't know. ahead to write. [laughter] ahead to rebel we call the book report about a biography

of an admirable woman so i went to the library. there were only two biographies of women in the entire library as far as i could see. one was eleanor roosevelt and the other was the duchess of windsor. even by nine or ten or never i have had quite enough of eleanor roosevelt. so i chose the duchess of windsor. i brought it home. mother asked me what i was doing. i said, well, i'm writing this book report on the duchess of windsor's because she is an admirable woman. my mother got bent. she said, admirable? what did she ever do in her life except marry somebody she shouldn't have? so i learned the lesson and i took the book back and turned it in.

of course i did the inevitable eleanor roosevelt. i sort of got imprinted, i think, very early on, the biography is a way of exploring that which you, that which you admire. my mother was quite right to keep me from the duchess of windsor. i think that we are all very lucky man did not start writing biographies earlier because i probably would have produced the definitive biography of hopalong cassidy. [laughter] when i was six, what i really wanted to be was a cowboy. started at that point, i would have certainly written about hopalong cassidy. so now we will move ahead to virginia woolf.